Chanteys of M. J. Powers, 1918

Subject: RE: Chanteys of M. J. Powers, 1918
From: meself
Date: 25 Jul 26 - 09:07 PM

[Going back to the original post, which I thought was the latest one!]

"Habit" meaning "customary outfit", while probably out of use now, I believe would have been widely familiar into the 20th century. As a child, I first encountered it in relation to nuns - a "nun's habit" being the "customary outfit" in question.

Also regarding habits/hip-boots/high-boots: somewhere I have lyrics for a shanty in which the speaker speculates that the person who's been there since he's been gone would have been a large African-American "with his sea-boots on" ....

Subject: RE: Chanteys of M. J. Powers, 1918
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 27 Jul 26 - 08:25 PM

Jon, those side references to "Dutchman" are helpful!

***
re: the "fly-time" chanteys, when I read it, my brainstorm was this:

One can conceivably distinguish "chanty" repertoire on the basis of musical style/form. This is something that I personally hammer on, but the idea doesn't seem to get much traction, I think, because many people are content to define chanties simply by the criterion that a song is sung with maritime labor. But not all songs are created equal.

The subtitle to Hugill's book, something like "work songs and songs sung as work songs" reveals the absurdity of defining a chanty, in any critical discussion, merely as whatever is sung with sailors' work. What in the world is a "song sung as a work song"? Innocently, we can imagine that means there's some song like "John Brown's Body" that is well known without a working context association and that such a song has been applied to a work task. Does it then "become" a work song? What then are the "work songs"? How is one so sure that such a song does not also exist apart from a working context?

Whereas the wording of the proposition, "work songs [versus] songs sung as work songs" doesn't make sense, I believe it's getting at a real distinction in musical form/style (as opposed to a distinction, precisely, in how a song is "used"). Some forms lend themselves to work more exclusively. By the same token, such songs as that lend themselves less to certain modes of "entertainment"—particularly entertainment that takes the form of sitting around and not moving your body and/or when attentive listening is the focus.

The brainstorm is that Powers may have drawn a soft line between songs that were most deeply embedded in a more exclusive work context and others that *could* be envisioned as entertainment—though they could also be "applied" to work.

For instance, I have trouble imagining this stevedore song as anything but a "work song":

https://youtu.be/b8haxcFAKWw?si=oVLriIS0lM3HQIwo

I'm not going to sit around and listen to that. I'm content to think of that as the "work song" in Hugill's subtitle.

And I'm content to think of "John Brown's Body," sung at a capstan (where virtually any song with a pulse "could" be sung) as a model representative of Hugill's "songs sung as work songs."


Yet, there are edge cases and I think "Blow the Man Down" is one. BTMD comes to mind here, indeed, because maybe it is related to Powers' "knocking a Dutchman down" thing.

By the time we see BTMD in the literature, it is something somewhat distinguishable from the (arguable) "pure" work songs. It often has more of a coherent narrative that one may be inclined to "complete" as a "full song." Its examples are fairly consistent in that, too, as opposed to being ad hoc and/or redundant lines. Its consistent, steady, 6/8 meter is *not* that common among the full repertoire of "chanties." Yes, there are a bunch of other chanties in that meter but in the full scope of repertoire that handful is in the minority. And there was the presumably "other" (or maybe earlier) form of BTMD as "Knock a Man Down" which, to me at least, sits better in the work song category. I was struck by how Luce's volume reproduces (from RC Adams) "Knock a Man Down" under a chanties section but then has BTMD under (non-chanty) songs as "The Black Ball Liner's Song" (or something like that -- I'm going from memory). Maybe BTMD "evolved" from "Knock a Man Down," I don't know. But in any case, BTMD emerges as something that—admittedly with some subjectivity—I hear as a song "for fun." BTMD has the form (perhaps due to its heritage) that "works" for work. And yet, to sing it while working feels a little "performative" and pretentious to me.

In sum, I'm proposing that Powers had from his experience a personal sense of what types of songs ("chanties") really felt central to the work activities he experienced and, by the same token, had a mental category for other "chanties" that were outside that core and felt more at home in less serious (fly-time) situations. They were under the umbrella of the genre as a general musical style, but their specifics of style made them less favorable to serious application.

Subject: RE: Chanteys of M. J. Powers, 1918
From: meself
Date: 28 Jul 26 - 11:53 AM

That link doesn't seem to work - for me, anyway. Maybe this will: https://youtu.be/b8haxcFAKWw?si=oVLriIS0lM3HQIwo

(And back on my latest hobby-horse: "riding habit", meaning the "suit" you wear for riding, is another usage I've often come across.)

Subject: RE: Chanteys of M. J. Powers, 1918
From: Lighter
Date: 28 Jul 26 - 05:20 PM

Thanks, Gibb. While I fully agree that chanteys are best identified by their form and use for work at sea, I'd also say that a song is a work song when it is used as a work song.

But as Bill Clinton said, it all depends on the definition of "is."

Two possibilities are "is always or almost always" and "is in this instance."

Captain Rufus H. Young of Hancock, Maine, told Eckstrom and/or Smyth in 1927 that "Johnny Fill Up the Bowl" (with peculiar lyrics) was a "very favorite chantey for getting under way."

It was a chantey when used as a chantey. But that doesn't mean it's useful to say "Johnny, Fill Up the Bowl" - widely popular during the Civil War - "is" generally or by nature a chantey - even though it has a perfect chantey structure.

I think Hugill's nod to "songs used as work songs" is perfectly legit insofar as he only included such songs as he knew had been so used, even though countless others may have been used that way by one crew or another.

Like the English language, the idea of the chantey has a solid core (songs used solely as work songs at sea) and fuzzy edges. "Haul Away, Joe" is/was always a chantey (except when sung as folkie entertainment!) "Johnny, Fill Up the Bowl" and many others are/were
chanteys only if and when used as chanteys.

Subject: RE: Chanteys of M. J. Powers, 1918
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 31 Jul 26 - 09:43 AM

That's just it though, Jon. "Johnny, Fill Up the Bowl" *doesn't* have "a perfect chantey structure." Well, not in my mind, at least, nor necessarily—more importantly to my argument—in the minds of Powers etc.

I *don't* agree that "chanteys are best identified by their form and use for work at sea." My emphasis, again, is practically entirely on the the first part: identified by form. Therefore, while I definitely believe you've captured an existing ontology with this,

"Like the English language, the idea of the chantey has a solid core (songs used solely as work songs at sea) and fuzzy edges."

it's not the one that I'm talking about. Respectfully, I think that merely acknowledges fuzziness. But I was not suggesting there is no fuzziness, quite the opposite. I was saying that empirical features of the song's form and style are what create the "solid core"—not songs used as work songs at sea.

I'm not trying to get at what ~"people," as in most folks we encounter, have inside their minds for "chantey." OK, well, I I did touch on it, but only to contrast what I am getting at :) — what someone like Powers might have had in *his* mind. The issue is that this is a mind that has created a category of "fly-time chanteys" which "we" are (I think?) struggling to understand due to a different ontology. Powers, I suggest, had his concept shaped by very specific circumstances. Probably (I guess) he was very minimally exposed to any of the discourse about chanties that shaped up in the articles and books etc. His concept, as I have been discussing in this thread, may have been notably "different" in having been steeped in the cotton screwing environment.

What belonged in and out of the category of chanties was broadly different for African heritage and European heritage people— roughly correlated to racial populations. One can look at the repertoire of the whalers of St. Vincent (e.g. through Abrahams work) and see a different concept of shanty shape up compared to what we see in, say, many of Carpenter's British interviewees. A friend in the Toronto-based chanty performing group Pressgang Mutiny told me how surprised they were to learn what Vincentians considered of "shanties" when Pressgang Mutiny went down to St. Vincent to collaborate with them. I'm in the Lesser Antilles right now where, previously in visiting Grenada, found something problematic between the way local people would classify chanties and what Alan Lomax, who recorded the songs and, I believe, had something of a subsequent influence on how they would understand their music, framed the chanty thing. There was a whole load of songs that to me are clearly in the "chanties" pot (whatever we name them), including these things people sang at wakes, but which Lomax didn't identify as such in his notes. He tried to prompt them to sing chanties by asking if they knew "A Rovin'"! And when I invoked "chanty" to a Carriacouan in 2017, he was like "Oh, so you mean 'In the Bay of Biscay O,' right?" In Guyana, they had had "chanties" (as they call [and spell] it) sung by the freelance gold miners who rowed to the gold fields, but same songs are part of their "kwe-kwe" wedding rituals.

I am suggesting that cotton screwers of New Orleans had a different enough ontology of chanty and that understanding Powers' concept, being forged through exposure to the latter, calls for an adjustment in thinking.   


Overall—and with apologies if it seems I hammer on this too much!—I think what different peoples engaged in folklife qualified as chanties got contorted by how English writers on the outside took up the topic. The latter shaped a concept which forced their own culture's understanding onto the situation, one in which they were hung up on the idea of "sailors' work songs" because that was the aspect most novel to them.